Drive boredom out of your classroom - and keep it out - with the student-engagement strategies in this book. You'll learn how to gain and sustain the attention of your students from the moment the bell rings. Perfect for teachers of all subjects and grade levels, these activities go head-to-head with student boredom and disengagement, resulting in class time that's more efficient, more educational, and loads more fun!Author Bryan Harris, an expert in student engagement and classroom management, has extensive experience in K-12 motivation and brain-based learning. In this book, he brings togeth.
Drive boredom out of your classroom – and keep it out – with the student-engagement strategies in this book. You’ll learn how to gain and sustain the attention of your students from the moment the bell rings. Perfect for teachers of all subjects and grade levels, these ready-to-use activities go head-to-head with student boredom and disengagement, resulting in class time that’s more efficient, more educational, and loads more fun! Contents include: Strategies to Begin a Lesson Strategies to End a Lesson Strategies for Solo/Independent Work Strategies for the Whole Group Strategies for Engaging Reluctant Learners Bonus: The book also features a Quick Guide to Parent Engagement, with loads of suggestions for increasing student engagement by partnering with families. Companion Book Available! For more strategies, don’t miss the companion book Battling Boredom, Part 2. Bryan Harris teams up with technology integration expert and former teacher Lisa Bradshaw to provide additional activities on academic talk, feedback to boost student performance, meaningful writing and reflection prompts, movement-based activities, effective classroom technology integration, and more!
Are your students bored in class? According to research, a majority of American high school students report being bored in class and fewer than 5% claimed that they were rarely bored during a typical day in school. Former journalist and veteran teacher Martha Rush decided this would not do for her Minnesota students. Moving beyond asking open-ended questions and making connections to their own lives, Martha began to engage her government, journalism, and economics classes in meaty discussions, competitions, simulations, and authentic work, like running a newspaper or starting a business. Building on her more than 800 interviews with high school graduates, she offers up strategies in all subject areas for active engagement, moving way beyond traditional passive memorization of information. She describes how to create innovative experiences in your classroom, and shares her own lessons and her students' work. Beat Boredom will help you join the ranks of teachers who have challenged the status quo and found ways to motivate even the most reluctant learners.
This very well organized book is packed with practical solutions to the most common classroom problems – side talk, rude behavior, calling out, students losing focus, and students refusing even to try. Every solution is classroom-tested, highly effective, and quick and easy to implement! Use this book to help make your classroom a happier, more productive learning environment – one in which your students thrive and everyone benefits!
Drive boredom out of your classroom—and keep it out—with the student engagement strategies in this book. In the first Battling Boredom, bestselling author Bryan Harris offered strategies on beginning a lesson, ending a lesson, small group work, and large group work. Now in Battling Boredom Part 2, Harris teams up with technology integration expert and former teacher Lisa Bradshaw to provide additional strategies on new topics such as academic talk, feedback, writing, classroom technology, and more. You’ll learn how to: Increase the quality and effectiveness of feedback to boost student performance. Engage students in meaningful reflection with writing prompts and exercises. Reenergize a lethargic class using movement-based activities. Integrate technology to create a more enriching classroom experience for students. Encourage students to speak up, share their ideas, and talk about their learning. With this toolbox of instructional strategies, you’ll have even more ways to end student boredom before it begins, resulting in class time that’s more efficient, more educational, and loads more fun!
A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of the Year A Guardian “Best Book about Ideas” of the Year No one likes to be bored. Two leading psychologists explain what causes boredom and how to listen to what it is telling you, so you can live a more engaged life. We avoid boredom at all costs. It makes us feel restless and agitated. Desperate for something to do, we play games on our phones, retie our shoes, or even count ceiling tiles. And if we escape it this time, eventually it will strike again. But what if we listened to boredom instead of banishing it? Psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood contend that boredom isn’t bad for us. It’s just that we do a bad job of heeding its guidance. When we’re bored, our minds are telling us that whatever we are doing isn’t working—we’re failing to satisfy our basic psychological need to be engaged and effective. Too many of us respond poorly. We become prone to accidents, risky activities, loneliness, and ennui, and we waste ever more time on technological distractions. But, Danckert and Eastwood argue, we can let boredom have the opposite effect, motivating the change we need. The latest research suggests that an adaptive approach to boredom will help us avoid its troubling effects and, through its reminder to become aware and involved, might lead us to live fuller lives. Out of My Skull combines scientific findings with everyday observations to explain an experience we’d like to ignore, but from which we have a lot to learn. Boredom evolved to help us. It’s time we gave it a chance.
How filling life with play-whether soccer or lawn mowing, counting sheep or tossing Angry Birds -- forges a new path for creativity and joy in our impatient age Life is boring: filled with meetings and traffic, errands and emails. Nothing we'd ever call fun. But what if we've gotten fun wrong? In Play Anything, visionary game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost shows how we can overcome our daily anxiety; transforming the boring, ordinary world around us into one of endless, playful possibilities. The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the secret truth of fun and games. Play Anything, reveals that games appeal to us not because they are fun, but because they set limitations. Soccer wouldn't be soccer if it wasn't composed of two teams of eleven players using only their feet, heads, and torsos to get a ball into a goal; Tetris wouldn't be Tetris without falling pieces in characteristic shapes. Such rules seem needless, arbitrary, and difficult. Yet it is the limitations that make games enjoyable, just like it's the hard things in life that give it meaning. Play is what happens when we accept these limitations, narrow our focus, and, consequently, have fun. Which is also how to live a good life. Manipulating a soccer ball into a goal is no different than treating ordinary circumstances- like grocery shopping, lawn mowing, and making PowerPoints-as sources for meaning and joy. We can "play anything" by filling our days with attention and discipline, devotion and love for the world as it really is, beyond our desires and fears. Ranging from Internet culture to moral philosophy, ancient poetry to modern consumerism, Bogost shows us how today's chaotic world can only be tamed-and enjoyed-when we first impose boundaries on ourselves.
"There is a substantive body of research that indicates formative assessment can significantly improve student learning. Yet, this same research shows that the features of formative assessment that impact student achievement are sadly missing from many classrooms (Black, et al., 2003). This book provides teachers with guidance and suggestions for using formative assessment to improve teaching and learning in the mathematics classroom, and identifies and describes practical techniques teachers can use to build a rich repertoire of formative assessment strategies. The acronym, FACT, is used to label the techniques included in this book. FACT stands for Formative Assessment Classroom Technique. Through the varied use of FACTs, explicitly tied to a purpose for gathering information about or promoting students' thinking and learning, teachers can focus on what works best for learning and design or modify lessons to fit the needs of the students"--Provided by publisher.
With no one to play with, Charlie is very bored one Sunday afternoon until he discovers that his toys feel the same way, and together they launch an attack against boredom.
